1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a mobile device and particularly to a solution wherein location information from a plurality of mobile devices communicated to a mobile social networking server.
2. Related Art
Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous. Children carry them and so do adults. Children use them to ask their parents to come pick them up at a mall or a park. Often parents spend a lot of time trying to locate their child at a mall when they get a call for a ride. Similarly, children wait for a long time outside a mall waiting for their parents to arrive, often in inclement weather. This problem is also faced by mobile users who travel to a new country on business and pleasure and wait for a taxi pickup at an airport, outside an airport or in train stations.
Quite often, a user has a mobile phone with a GPS and may desire to go to a store. The user has to type in an address to activate the GPS based navigational facilities. The address could be long and comprise of more than 50 characters quite often, making the user struggle with the painfully small and cramped keyboard on the mobile device. Quite often the keyboards on a mobile device has 3 letters of the alphabet mapped into a single key that makes data entry very complicated and tiring.
Quite often a user looks up a store in a phone book and gets a phone number to the store. However, the user does not know the location or directions to the store. The user is forced to call the store using the phone number, write down directions and then hope to find it while driving.
People, especially the youth, have started interacting with each other using a social networking services, forming a community of online users who can share personal details and meet other people. Such social networks provide the ability to create blogs with personal details, etc. and share them within the community. However, such social interactions are not easily migrated to the mobile environments yet. In addition, the concepts of mobility and social networking have not been combined effectively, and even rudimentary integrations between the two are not currently available in the market. Thus, the phenomenon of social networking on the Internet and the technology revolution of mobile devices have bypassed each other with no effective solutions yet having been developed that leverage the advantages of one for useful interactions enabled by the other.
It may be possible for a member of a social network to specify where he is resident (which city), but that is only a static information. People travel all the time, and the social networks do not have an easy and efficient way for another member to determine where all his friends in a social network are currently located. All that the member can do is browse through a list of friends, looking at their addresses and expect to find them at those locations, which are static locations, often outdated and not updated, and do not really show a current/temporary address/location.
If a person wants a ride (in a car, motorcycle etc.) from a friend, the person often has to call a taxi or call his friends (or more than one friend) to see if any of them can give him a ride, and if they are able to currently even help him. The person has no way to determine if any of his friends in his social community are currently in a position to help him out by giving him a ride.
vCard standard for exchanging electronic business cards has been around for some time and is used for sending email attachments of business cards. They can contain name, address, phone numbers, logos, URLs and photos. However, they do not really help a user in easily navigating from his house to a business (such as a store). There are some deficiencies in the contents of most vCards. Other variations to vCards exists, such as hCard that provide similar features. However vCard information comprises mostly static information, and does not reflect the current location or even the current contact information of a user.
GPS satellites have been used for a while for navigation. GPS satellites do not actually pinpoint your location as is commonly believed. The 24 satellites circling the earth each contain a precise clock that transmits a signal comprising a time to the GPS receiver in a user's mobile device. The mobile device processes the satellite signals to determine geometrically where the user is located.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.